Yet even to this slave Jesus Christ
stoops, from where he sits at the right hand of the Father, and says,
'Fear not, thou whom man despiseth, for I am thy brother. Fear not,
for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name, thou art
mine.'"
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" is a work of religion; the fundamental principles
of the gospel applied to the burning question of negro slavery. It
sets forth those principles of the Declaration of Independence that
made Jefferson, Hamilton, Washington, and Patrick Henry anti-slavery
men; not in the language of the philosopher, but in a series of
pictures. Mrs. Stowe spoke to the understanding and moral sense
through the imagination.
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" made the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law an
impossibility. It aroused the public sentiment of the world by
arousing in the concrete that which had been a mere series of abstract
propositions. It was, as we have already said, an appeal to the
imagination through a series of pictures. People are like children,
and understand pictures better than words. Some one rushes into your
dining-room while you are at breakfast and cries out, "Terrible
railroad accident, forty killed and wounded, six were burned alive."
"Oh, shocking! dreadful!" you exclaim, and yet go quietly on with your
rolls and coffee. But suppose you stood at that instant by the wreck,
and saw the mangled dead, and heard the piercing shrieks of the
wounded, you would be faint and dizzy with the intolerable spectacle.
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